On to the Next One: Jay-Z Beefs with A.I....Are Other Artists Next?

When we're first learning to make music, most of us don't worry about an A.I. stealing our flow. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But when Jay-Z heard himself on the internet spitting iambic pentameter -- Hamlet's "To Be, or Not to Be" soliloquy, to be exact -- "flattered" is hardly the word for how he responded. It was produced by a well-trained computer speech synthesis program using artificial intelligence. An anonymous YouTube artist named Vocal Synthesis has created a library of popular voices mismatched with unexpected famous texts, including George Bush reading "In Da Club" by 50 Cent, Barack Obama reading "Juicy" by Notorious B.I.G, and, yes, Jay-Z reading Hamlet (and Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire").